This is a unique movie that takes important features and themes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and smartly plays with them, placing them in a contemporary Russian context.

Val'ka, the main character — a skinny, young guy with long locks and a pronounced Adam’s apple — hates his mother and her fancy suitor, his natural uncle, Petia. He suspects that his father, a naval officer, did not die of natural causes and that uncle Petia was somehow involved. His dead father, a stern man in the uniform of a captain of the first rank, appears before Val'ka at night and at crucial moments in the film. Val'ka is having an affair with a young woman, Olia, who is as pitiful and defenseless a being as Ophelia. And at the end of the film, this post-Soviet Danish prince will settle scores drastically with Gertrude and Claudius, and also with the unfortunate Ophelia, putting a tragic end to his relations with the world.